Yann Martel

LIFE OF PI

As I suppose almost everyone who picks up this book will already know, its
centrepiece is the story of a 16-years-old Indian boy in a lifeboat with
a tiger. After the tragic sinking of a cargo ship carrying zoo animals
and the boy's family, the only survivors apart from the boy, whose
nickname is Pi, are a hyena, a zebra with a broken leg, a female
orang-utan and a adult Bengal tiger. Before long only the boy and the
tiger are left alive. The main part of the book is the story of the
vicissitudes they go through: thirst, hunger, heat, exposure,
exhaustion. And, of course, the narrator, Pi, is at constant risk of
being killed by his ferocious companion.

The story obviously verges on the incredible, but for much of the book
the reader's disbelief is held in check by the vividness with which the
boy's experiences are described. He keeps himself alive by means of the
survival equipment in the lifeboat and by fishing. He also has to feed
the tiger, to prevent it from eating him. To avoid this fate, Pi calls
on his extensive knowledge of how zoo animals think; he dominates the
tiger by controlling it with a whistle and by making it feel seasick
whenever it threatens to become aggressive.

This part of the narrative works pretty well; Pi's survival remains just
about credible. However, you sense that magic realism is never far away
and towards the end of the book it finally breaks through. I have to
admit that this is a genre I generally dislike and I began to be out of
sympathy with the novel at this point. First, Pi goes temporarily blind
and in that state encounters a second blind survivor in another boat who
attempts to throttle him. This individual appears to be a hallucination
but he is nevertheless killed and eaten by the tiger, so how literally
are we supposed to take him?

Next, boy and tiger land on a mysterious floating island populated by
meerkats. The island appears to be hospitable at first but later it
turns out to have sinister properties. The whole island sequence is
dreamlike in character and once again it is unclear how real it is
supposed to be.

Finally Pi makes landfall in Mexico and the tiger disappears into the
hinterland. Two Japanese investigators interview Pi and manifestly
disbelieve his story, so he produces an alternative (and distasteful)
version involving cannibalism but no animals. The implication is that
we all believe what we want to believe.

The book is mainly a first-person account purportedly told to the author
by Pi himself. He is now middle-aged and living in Canada. The author
has heard about the story from an old man in India, who assures him that
it will make him believe in God. And religion is never far away; in the
introductory section of the book, covering some 90-odd pages, Pi
indulges in a lot of theological reminiscencing as he describes how, as
a boy, he became simultaneously Christian and Muslim as well as Hindu. I
found this somewhat tedious and would probably have given up at that
point had I not wanted to reach the shipwreck.

Martel, however, seems to want us to take the theological dimension
seriously and I suspect that there is an implied connection between the
magic realism element and theology, although what the connection is
isn't clear. I don't think the statement that the story will make us
believe in God is meant to be tongue-in-cheek. For me, this places more
metaphysical weight on the tale than it can reasonably be asked to
bear.